The explosion in popularity of social networking has opened up many new marketing opportunities for businesses of all sizes. However, choosing the right strategy for your company may seem like a daunting task. Questions like ‘which sites should I use?‘ and ‘how can I attract people to my business?’ may be at the back of your mind.

In the coming weeks we will be posting a series of blogs on putting social media marketing to work for your businesses. The series starts with a beginner’s guide to Twitter.

In other words, it’s a way for you to talk and connect with people interested in your business as well as giving you a platform to post important information relevant to your business and the wider industry.

For example, we use our Sign-Up.to Twitter page to talk about the people behind our business, post links to our blog posts, links to our website as well as re-tweeting important industry information. It’s important to us that we get a balance between showing the people behind our business, to give followers a personal touch, and informing our followers about important industry insights. We’re even able to quickly and informally communicate with our customers, helping develop long term business relationships.

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s been built to allow businesses to respond to customers in real time, as well as giving users an opportunity to share your tweets with all their ‘followers’. Followers are people who are interested in your business and see your messages in their main Twitter timeline. They are also the people who will share your messages with their friends.

To give some background, Twitter launched in 2006 and has over 175 million registered users. Over 95 million tweets are sent on a daily basis. At the end of 2010 Twitter created a year in review website demonstrating how powerful Twitter has become in communicating important events in the media. At Sign-Up.to we believe that Twitter has a strong user base that will allow for any company to successfully communicate and interact with users.

But how does Twitter compare to Facebook? Facebook is now the largest social networking site with over 500 million users worldwide and according to Facebook themselves people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

Twitter, by comparison, is smaller and focuses primarily on status updates. The messages you post on Twitter have to be within 140 characters whereas Facebook is ideal for posting large amounts of information, photo albums and events.

However, we believe both websites have their place and that businesses can benefit from having a presence on both. For example, you can upload photos onto your Facebook page and then post a link to the album on Twitter. We’ll be talking more about Facebook and its benefits in the coming weeks.

We believe that Twitter is an important part of a balanced online marketing program because:

It’s a quick and easy way of sending information to people interested in your business.

It allows you to respond and communicate with customers in real-time.

With 175 million users you can quickly reach a large audience. Twitter promotes sharing information, which will help your business reach new people through a free and instantaneous method.

Social networking has become an essential part of our every day lives and how we communicate with each other, so it can help your business remain competitive in the market place.

Our next blog post will focus on the first stages of setting up your Twitter page, but we hope you’ve found this beginner’s guide interesting. If you have any questions about social media and setting up your business presence please get in touch with us!

2 Responses to “Social sharing: A beginner’s guide to Twitter”

In his keynote at Mobile World Conference last CEO of Twitter #DickC was positioning Twitter as way for people to follow a particular interest – be it the event #MWC11, a brand #vodaphone or even a product #iPhone. One trend for 2011 is the appearance of the hash tags on tv shows #glee to encourage people to share in the event at the time of broadcast.